Arcana
by Petronia
Summary: Series of 22 drabbles: one for each Major Arcana in a Tarot deck, associating one or two characters from GetBackers with the card's traditional iconography and significance. Incomplete.


**Arcana**

* * *

_0. Fool_

Ginji doesn't remember his first step outside. It should have felt momentous – like falling off a cliff – but his eyes were dazzled with dreams, and there was no lintel to speak of. Mugenjou blurred into mundane slums when he wasn't looking, which then became warmth and light and working cars and the music of happy impetuous crowds.

That's how easy it was, to discard history and be born anew.

He does remember new boots, sometime that week. "Plenty of footwork in this job," Ban says, co-opting his laces. And Ginji, trying not to bounce on his heels, thinking: _Ready._

_Ready._

* * *

_ i. Magician_

Ban is charming when he wants to be; he's clever and has a way with words, spinning out guarantees of successful retrieval to befuddled potential clients. To Ginji it looks like magic. Something from nothing – not so different from what Ban does with a glance, every human desire or fear unravelling in his blue eyes, quicksand mirages that shatter like glass.

(Ban corrects him, tells Ginji he's making a place for himself – for them – out of their combined pride and effort. No magic involved. But perhaps he doesn't believe it: they were once strangers, and now they have each other.)

* * *

_ii. High Priestess_

What Ban dreams sometimes: sense impressions. A dim parlor, redolent of bergamot and lemon tea. Always a little too warm. Wavering shadows of lace curtains.

What he dreams: hands shuffling the oracle deck, veined and dark-spotted with age. The exhausted cards fall with a sound like rain. She'd told his fortune long ago, decades before his birth, and laid his fate at the altar of the pinwheeling stars. This he knew before a word ever passed between them. Understanding was written in his sursurrating blood, in her blue eyes.

"Do you think you're strong, boy? Tell me what you dream."

* * *

_iii. Empress_

Hevn has a ringtone for each subcontractor, former client, and contact category; the sound is how she remembers.

Basically she's on 24-hour call. If it's not arranging interviews or following up on cases, it's answering ads. Or networking. A sexy phone manner nets surprisingly good results. The boys (that's how she thinks of them, with a note of motherly affection lacking in their face-to-face interaction) accuse her of skimming off the top, and see nothing of her hard work. She bitches them out, but expects them only to succeed.

Push comes to shove, jobs equal food for everyone. It's that simple.

* * *

_iv. Emperor_

Shido had said simply: "I will follow you." He rarely spoke, in those days, and his words meant everything.

Kazuki had knelt, graceful in princely fealty.

MakubeX had begged to join Volts, eyes wide and shining, and none could refuse him. He rose through the ranks, became indispensable, honoured.

Masaki was always there, a pillar of strength at his back.

Their belief and that of others made him what he was: emperor, nearly a god. He brought harsh justice to Mugenjou. Thunderstorms caused his name to be invoked, in terror and respect.

He hardly understood why his lands seemed barren.

* * *

_v. Hierophant_

Paul likes his life organised. Coffee in the morning, paper during the day. Natsumi, Rena, an occasional customer. The blessed quiet.

Then there's the dreaded duo. Paul kicks them out when their tab runs too long, and inevitably the west wind blows them back in the door, with gusts of rain and a little bit of money to tide things over. Never enough, but he takes what he can. A man has his responsibilities.

One such responsibility lies under his counter, magnetised data enclosed in unassuming plastic. Paul glances at it occasionally. Then he closes the drawer again and waits.

* * *

_vi. Lovers_

That evening Ban swaggers in the door as usual – and stops in his tracks, staring. After a moment Paul lifts his head from his paper.

"Ah," he says. "I see."

"I came," Amano Ginji says, but his eyes tell the story better. Ban draws a deep breath.

"About time," he says. Smirks, then, not flippantly enough. Ginji feels something lift from him in that instant, leaving him light enough to float. "Master?"

"His coffee's on the house, feckless layabout. As if you had the money."

Ban touches his hand as they leave, briefly.

It's that weightless moment Ginji remembers afterward.

* * *

_vii. Chariot_

Afterward comes mundanity: to wit, obtaining a set of wheels. Ginji watches in wonder as Ban tinkers, cursing and prodding irritably at his glasses when they slip down. It leaves motor oil smudges on his nose.

"Will it really run?" he asks. But Ban can do anything.

"The purpose of a retrieval specialist," Ban quotes absently, "is to fit the last piece back into the puzzle. Because until that screw is found, there's no telling what the nitro boosters will – aha!" He steps back, triumphant. "Number two wrench, Ginji."

Ginji complies. "What's nitro?"

"Oh, you'll see," Ban says. "You'll see."

* * *

_viii. Strength_

On summer nights Madoka plays for Shido in her garden: Paganini, Tchaikovsky, folksongs that catch her fancy. Shido sits with his back against a tree trunk, and his animals creep stealthily close through the grass, drawn by the music. Even the lion lies quiescent at her feet, golden eyes hooded and attentive.

A poet would not lack metaphor, but mythmaking (firelight casting flickering shadows over a cave wall) is an all-too-human endeavour. Shido has no use for allegorical praise. To him as to his beasts, these things are singular and beloved: darkness, the sweet complaint of one violin, and she.

* * *

_ix. Hermit_

They were besieged; their followers fled. Makubex said nothing. He returned to his machines in the echoing hall, and sealed the door.

For three days and four nights he built his pipeline. An inverted tree of viral protocol drilled upward to Babylon. The connection was tenuous: one keystroke would call the Flood.

At last he wavered. Instinct whispered of _geis,_ traps not set but woven into his world's warp and woof.

Still he had to know.

Sakura started to her knees when the door opened. In the penumbra Makubex's face was pale; his eyes glittered.

"Gather the others," he said.

* * *

_x. Wheel of Fortune_

"—Upon which they threw themselves at me. I mean literally." Emishi gazes up pensively at the treetops, arms crossed behind his head. "I shit thee not, sahib: I was the conquering hero. A man for the ages. Florence Nightingale could not have been more sacred to a nurse's heart."

"So then what?"

"So then Shido kicked my ass for no reason. That bastard Midou, too – couldn't figure it out. First time I've ever seen them agree on anything."

Amon nods sagely. "That's life for you, huh? You win some, you lose some."

"That you do, Amon-yan. That you do."

* * *

_xi. Justice_

Liberated from the tyranny of sight, the other senses sharpen. Juubei's world is sound and touch and odour: Kazuki is defined by a minute chiming of bells, an eddying of air as he moves through the room, a santal-sweet scent. In battle Juubei discerns his aura, like a white flame flickering and dancing in the darkness. But he cannot see Kazuki smile, or meet his gaze again.

It is the only loss worth mentioning.

Juubei does not regret. As his senses were freed, so was he: he would have suffered more, and without recourse, had he not been allowed penance.

* * *

_xiv. Temperance_

Despite what outsiders assume, Fuuchouin School was never intended for women: few but men master the techniques.

Kazuki learnt as a child that there are two sides to every coin. Light/dark, male/female, yin/yang, hidden/apparent. His lessons trained him in self-possession and equilibrium, in willow-strength and silk-strength, in the intellectual knife's edge of paradox.

What he was not taught was that there was a hidden side to Fuuchouin as well; not until the black thread tore his childhood apart, in an hour of blood and terror.

It took him years of darkness, afterward, before he was reconciled again to the light.

* * *

_xviii. Moon_

Himiko handles the pipet delicately. Two drops only: an aldehydic tang… Yamato is puttering somewhere beyond her sight. He lays a hand on her shoulder and says something. The touch is warm, an ordinary distraction.

"Just a second," she says. "What is it, Aniki?"

When she turns around the door is closing.

She's in time to see him disappear around the corner.

The corridors don't end.

Himiko wakes before dawn; lies there, unseeing, waiting for light. Every night she follows him, and the journey back is longer.

Soon, she thinks, it will be her birthday. As it had been his.

* * *

_xix. Sun_

Lately Teshimine stays a moving target, always one step ahead. Direct contact is too great a risk.

Ginji would ask questions, plead – and there was the nagging regret. He remembers uncomplicated joy in those brown eyes, before lightning descended; memory, he thinks, keeps us human.

He's in Ueno Park by coincidence, that day.

Early November, the sky dizzyingly blue. Children's voices – and Ginji's too tall to romp like this, with kids half his age and his partner looking on, but his laughter rings out unshadowed. Present overlapping distant past.

Teshimine keeps himself unseen. But as he walks away he's smiling.

* * *

_— Montreal, May 2005_


End file.
